


Dialogic: Season 1

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Dialogic [1]
Category: Castle
Genre: Absent Parents, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Loss, Loss of Parent(s), Male-Female Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 00:18:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18354707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: After watching around to the end of the series (i.e., "Hollander's Woods," because nothing after that exists), and taking some time to watch a few other things during workouts, I'm back around to the beginning of the series again.This story is 10 brief sketches, one for each episode of Season 1,  inspired by a line of dialogue from the episode.





	1. Epistolary—Flowers for Your Grave—1 x 01

_Do any of these groupies ever write you letters? . . . . Disturbing letters?  
—Kate Beckett, Flowers for Your Grave (1 x 01)_

* * *

 

 

The uniforms think it’s weird that she’s here. It _is_ weird that she’s here. A detective on a mail run? It’s worse than weird, it’s ridiculous.

“Detective Beckett.” The young woman takes the words right out of her mouth. “I’m Cherise. Mr. Castle said we should expect you.”

“Yes.” Kate hides a scowl as she busies herself clipping her apparently unnecessary shield to her belt.“We’re here to collect . . .”

“Mr. Castle’s fan mail,” she says briskly as she steps from behind the slick glass desk and moves toward a set of double doors. “Right this way.”

The room beyond is spacious. Its wall of windows affords a view of the city that’s nothing short of spectacular from this high up. A huge oval table dominates, something in a dark wood that offers a little more warmth than the icy glass and polished chrome of the reception area. Or would offer, if it weren’t absolutely covered in translucent US Mail bins.

“I’ve had it organized by year. You’ll find the most recent here at this end.” Cherise indicates the neat rows closest to the door as she passes them by and pauses halfway to the windows. “Here and here are the dates from around the relevant publication dates.”

“Relevant?” The answer lands a second too late to keep the stupid question from tumbling out of her mouth. “The books he’s cribbing from.”

“Exactly,” Cherise says with a smile. “Of course, I can’t guarantee there aren’t letters about those that came in at a later date, but as you can see . . .”

“These are open.” Kate only just manages to stop herself from pickup the topmost sheet with her bare hands. “Those are still sealed.” 

“Yes. Well.” Cherise looks uncomfortable. The crack in her hyper-efficient facade isn’t as satisfying as Kate would’ve thought it would be ten seconds ago. “Mr. Castle fell behind in opening it a while ago and he doesn’t seem to have caught up.”

“Caught . . .?” The room suddenly feels like it’s tilting. Kate has the dizzying sense that it’s trying to tip her right out the windows. “He opens all these _himself_?”

“Every one,” she nods like it’s a point of pride. “Until this last Derrick Storm book, he would read every single one.”

There’s something wistful in the young woman’s voice. Something sad, but Kate hardly hears it. She can hardly hear anything over the blood rushing in her ears and her heart drumming against her ribcage. She drifts along the table’s edge. Her fingers skip from bin to bin, tracing the dates scrawled in sharpie on the side. She moves backward through the years: _2006, 2005, 2004._

_2003_

She stops. She grips the edge of the bin hard enough that the raised plastic seam cuts into her palm. Her fingers itch, just inches away from the folded, typewritten sheet and the yellow-lined paper below. It’s in there somewhere. A single sheet of rough linen stationery that had been her mom’s.

It’s in there.

He read it.


	2. Repartee—Nanny McDead—1 x 02

_Whoever it was, she didn’t want to talk to him._

_ —Kate Beckett, Nanny McDead (1 x 02) _

* * *

This shouldn’t be a problem. He tells himself it shouldn’t for the _n_ th time as he stabs at the delete key, obliterating his _n_ th line of unbearably clunky dialogue.

He can’t find her voice. His as-yet-unnamed heroine has, as yet, remained stubbornly silent.

God knows it’s not for lack of inspiration. Beckett’s rapid-fire delivery ought to provide plenty of grist for the mill.

The thought has him pushing the laptop away hard enough to set off a domino effect of pencil cups, wind-up toys, and a thankfully empty mug. It has him reaching for the annoying little reporter’s cut spiral notebook he’s had to make do with since she slapped the phone out of his hand when she caught him taking notes under the interrogation room table.

He flips from one page to the next, his frustration growing. There’s plenty there. The pages are crowded with writing that’s sloppy enough to wound his professional pride. She’s quick, though. She cuts and thrusts so blindingly fast that he’s hard-pressed to keep up.

He does, though. Sloppy or not, he’s filled half the pages already with quips and commands and jokes so sly they leave him blinking down at the letters cramped between the narrow blue lines, but it’s not there. Her voice just isn’t there.

He flips to the day’s notes anyway. He taps the point of his pen next to the _03/16/09_ hastily scribbled at the top. His gaze lands on the left-hand margin. On something he barely remembers writing that crawls at a right angle to the desperate snatches of dialogue.

 _Voice recorder_.

It amounts to a stage direction. A simple note on things his heroine has at her disposal, but his mind snags on it. It snags on the moment right before when his mouth opened despite his best efforts.  
  
_Whose idea was that?_

He hears the question. Hears Brent Johnson’s utterly unconvincing response and her devastating echo.

_A mutual thing?_

He sees her finger coming down on the silver button and his mind snaps suddenly loose. He reaches for the laptop, scattering pencils and wind-up toys and sending the mug to the floor with a thump. His fingers fly over the keys and the page fills with short, sharp lines broken up white space. Hard returns that capture the back and forth and back again.

Time passes on the other side of the glass wall of his office, and when his mind finally slows—when his fingers finally stop—he knows he’s been exhausted for a while already.

He doesn’t close the laptop, though. He doesn’t close the file. He scrolls back and starts his first-pass edit. He looks for the clunkers—hollow, metallic things that have to go right away, but it’s a while before he comes to one. It’s a while before he comes to anything he even wants to tweak.

It’s there now. Her voice. It’s there, tucked right between the lines of his. 


	3. Amiable—Hedgefund Homeboys (1 x 03)

_Feet are cold._

_— Lanie Parish, ME, Hedge Fund Homeboys (1 x 03)_

* * *

 

 

 

“She has something, right?”

Castle trots to catch up. He’s somehow always trotting to catch up. Kate thinks maybe he wouldn’t have to if he weren’t always stopping to chat with every one of the six hundred new best friends he’s made since he started darkening her doorstep. Maybe he wouldn’t have to if every last one didn’t happily chat back.

“She would’t call us all the way down here if she didn’t have something,” he pants.

“What’s the matter, Castle?” she asks as she pushes through the last set of doors on the way to Lanie’s lab. “Already burn through that enthusiasm for dead bodies?”

“My enthusiasm for bodies burns as hot as ever, Detective.” He bounds ahead to get the door for her. He bows low and sweeps an _after you_ arm toward the threshold.

He’s always doing that, too. It’s unnecessary. It’s _annoying._ She brushes by him with a scowl that runs right into Lanie’s all-too-observant smirk. “Dr. Parish?”

The ME’s eyebrow shoots up at the pointed use of her title. If Kate were any less annoyed, she might blush at her own misdirected sharpness, but it’s been a long couple of days already. She’s pretty annoyed. Thankfully, though, her friend confines herself to a mild shake of the head as she pulls on a pair of gloves and reaches for the cold locker’s stiff silver handle.

Max Heller’s lifeless body slides into view. Kate catches a glimpse of Castle out of the corner of her eye. He’s caving in on himself. She does the math from this kid to his daughter and a little of her aggravation evaporates. He’s a pain in the ass, for sure, but he bears up under some pretty unbearable stuff. Plus, he occasionally knows better than to run his mouth.

Lanie takes them through what she has. The bruise and the BAC, and Kate hides a smile when his voice shoots up an octave over the number. There’s no bad boy in it. He’s all apoplectic, overprotective dad in the moment, and it hardly even irritates her when they’re on their way out and he makes a dash ahead of her to get the door again.

Hardly, but then Lanie calls after him. “Oh, Mr. Castle?”

He stops short in the act of pushing open the swinging door. The stiff spring carries it swiftly back, he catches it three inches from Kate’s nose as he twists back around.

“Thank you.” Lanie’s sly smile calls up something infinitely dopier in answer on his face.

“They made it?” He lets the door go entirely, ignoring the fact that the move more or less traps Kate halfway in, halfway out. “I trust Cinderella approves?”

“Oh, _hell_ yes.” Lanie laughs. “Won’t be leaving those babies at the ball.”

The slap of Kate’s palm against the door makes him jump. It makes him hop to. It’s satisfying even if she can feel another of Lanie’s smirks burning a hole between her shoulder blades. She stalks down the hall, lowering her shoulder as she hits the second set of swinging doors. He’s there a second before she is, though—of _course_ he is—and her shoulder makes contact with him instead of shitty, scuffed-up laminate.   
  
“Hey!” He manages to catch her by the shoulders, half breaking her fall, half stopping his own tumble backward. “You ok—”

“ _Slippers?_ ” she hisses. She brings her arms up between their bodies and breaks his hold on her shoulders like he’s a mugger after her shoulder bag. “You bought the Medical Examiner slippers?”

“Yes?” He takes an immediate step back, opening up space between them. “She said her feet were cold. Yesterday. In the water. So . . . slippers.”

He reaches the end of his ass-saving conversational gambit then. He blinks at her. She gives him back a hard stare, biting the inside of her own cheek viciously so the smile trying to fight its way out doesn’t make it. It’s ridiculous. _He’s_ ridiculous. She makes him sweat a second longer, just for good measure, then she’s off. She makes it a count of three before he launches himself after her. 

“I listen, you know, Beckett.” His words are choppy as he trots to catch up. “I pay attention. That’s why people like me.”

“Some people, Castle.” She spins to face him, timing it perfectly so the back of her body pops the last set of double doors wide a stride and a half before he can get there. “Maybe.” 


	4. Caesura—Hell Hath No Fury (1 x 04)

_“And when he didn’t come . . . home?”_

_ —Kate Beckett, Hell Hath No Fury (1 x 04) _

* * *

 

 

Something lives in that pause that he really ought to be more interested in. Strike that. It’s not that he’s not interested in it. He’s _very_ interested, even though he’s pretty sure he knows. The shape of it, anyway. He’s pretty sure that cold reading he did over bins full of fan mail got it pretty damned right in broad strokes, so he’s absolutely interested. Something just has him shying away from . . . doing the fine brushwork.

“Where do you live?” he asks, and it’s quite the case in point. 

They’re on the way from the Horns’ apartment to the late councilman’s campaign headquarters. It’s fresh in her mind, whatever it is that lives in the pause, but her attention, of necessity, is fixed on the mid-morning traffic. Her guard is down. It’s the perfect time to take advantage, but here he is asking stupid questions instead.

“Where do I _live_?” she repeats like even she can’t believe how stupid it is.

“Live. Sleep. Wake. Shower. Get dirty. Get naked. Fart unabashedly,” he says cheerfully, though he’s anything but. He’s irritated, truth be told. More with himself than with her, but it pushes him into pushing at last. “You know, _home?”_

“Remind me never to come to yours.” She dips her head forward and looks right past him to check the blind spot on his side of the car and punches the car forward into a space one lane over. “What with all the unabashed farting.”

“Come on, Beckett.” He turns his seat, swearing under his breath as the rough fabric of the seatbelt zips painfully acrossthe skin under his ear. “It’s not like I’m gonna stalk you.” She spares a precious fraction of her attention to fix him with a heavy stare. He mentally files away the word _baleful_ and adds, “When you’re off the clock.” 

“It’s good to have boundaries, Castle.”

“You would know,” he mutters.

“Me and all the other grownups.” She smiles serenely at the tail lights that come and go inches from her front bumper.

He jerks himself back to face front. He folds his arms, shoving tight fists into his armpits. He’s determined to pass the rest of the godforsaken, stop-and-go trip in silence, a resolution that doesn’t last quite as long the practically imaginary left turn arrow that has them near-gridlocked.

“Why won’t you _tell_ me?” His head swivels toward her again, winning him another fabric burn from the seatbelt.

She cuts the wheel suddenly to the right. The move startles him enough that he flinches a little, but she’s just pulling the car to the curb. She shifts into park and turns to him with an absolutely blank look.

“Why _would_ I tell you?” She gets out of the car.

He doesn’t. Not for a second. He stares out the window at the stenciled gold letters on the plate glass windows. _Families First * Re-Elect._ He contemplates the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: Why would she tell him?


	5. Anticipatory—A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05)

"Spidey sense.”  
—Richard Castle, A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05)

* * *

 

 

It’s not her turn to call. It’s not even her dad’s turn. They’re a few days yet from the schedule they certainly have never mapped out, but both keep to with a regularity that would have made her mother laugh. It’s nobody’s turn, but she tucks her feet up and dials his number anyway.

 _“_ Hi, Dad.”

 _“Katie_ , _”_ he says in exactly the way she knew he would, quietly pleased and just a little surprised. “ _I was just thinking about you_.”

She knew he’d say that, too. He always says it, but tonight it sounds like more than a father’s pleasant fiction.

“Oh yeah?” She smiles down at her own knees, warmed by the ritual. Settled by it in a way she hadn’t realized she needed. “What were you thinking?”

He takes the question literally. That’s another _always_ between the two of them. He tells her about work and what he’s been reading.

“ _I’ll save that one for you,”_ he says of a _New Yorker_ article.

“Dad,” she groans, more to hear him laugh than anything, and he does.

 _“There’ll be a quiz this time, young lady.”_ She laughs, too. They both know she hasn’t touched the stack of things he saved for her last time. 

He tells her who’s been bickering with whom at the Thursday morning Meeting he always goes to. He tells her so she knows without having to ask that he’s still going. That he’s ok.

 _“And you?”_ he asks. _“You’ve been keeping busy_?”

She takes her cue. She tells him funny bits and pieces about work. Lanie in hip waders and Espo and Ryan arguing about laundry room etiquette. She doesn’t tell him about the case. She doesn’t tell him about Castle and her impromptu confession. She’s not tempted to, and when they say their quiet _goodnight_ s a little while later, she’s glad to find it’s not why she picked up the phone tonight.

As she snaps off the light, though, she wonders why she did. Ben Davidson is part of it, she knows, andas she closes her eyes, shebraces for the pang of guilt. It comes. She hears his voice, gnarled with grief and rage. She sees the anxious, upturned faces of Melanie Cavanaugh’s daughters.

The guilt comes, but it goes, and in its place, something else entirely curves the corners of her mouth upward in the dark.

 _Spidey sense_.

She hears him—sees him—somewhere between sly and sheepish as he slides the phone into his pocket and drops into the chair beside her desk that he’s made his own. She sees him at the center of the ludicrous tableau at his front door—a father and a son and a man she came to know a little better in the moment his daughter rose up on tiptoe over one shoulder and his mother swanned into view over the other.

She smiles and turns on to her side. She drifts off with a smile and the words on her lips.

_Spidey sense._


	6. Flight Risk—Always Buy Retail (1 x 06)

_“I won’t let you leave town, and that’s exactly what you want isn’t it? To leave town.”_   
_—Kate Beckett, Always Buy Retail (1 x 06)_

 

 

* * *

They’re running Code 3 to Muhkta Baylor’s nefarious warehouse when he blurts out the question.

“You wanna run away with me?”

It’s taking his life into his hands in more than one way, a fact that’s made abundantly clearwhen her head whips toward him and the wheel follows.

_“What?”_

He’s caught in the tractor beam of her glare, so he doesn’t see exactly how close to Ryan and Esposito’s Crown Vic they actually get before she reflexively course corrects, but the look on her face strongly suggests that’s only the second leading cause of his immediate and painful death. He figures he’d better explain.

“Leave town. Salt the earth. Start over.” It’s tautology, not explanation, but that’s evidence in itself of how desperate the situation is. He can’t even _think,_ and it’s absolutely clear in his mind that this is the only possible course of action. “Run away.”

She doesn’t reply. Not to him, anyway. He shoots her a pleading look, but her eyes are back on the road. She grips the wheel and mutters under her breath, truly inspired curses that he really should be getting down on paper. But there’s no point in getting anything down on paper if he can’t get her on board.  

“You can pick where.”

He feels a pang, even as he says it. He contemplates the scenery, such as it is, streaking by. Battalions of graffiti-covered dumpsters flank grimy cinder block buildings. That gives way to weed-choked abandoned lots dotted with soiled furniture, and rusted, tipped-over appliances, and still, he knows he’ll miss it. She will, too. He thinks about the sharp, confident click of her heels on concrete and asphalt, and the masterful way she navigates every kind of traffic. New York is imprinted on her as much as him, but what can he do?

“Anywhere. As long as it has good schools.”

“Schools?” Her head swivels toward him again, though the car stays on the straight and narrow.

“For Alexis.” That’s another, more complicated pang. He sees his daughter’s face in the sickly fluorescent light of the bullpen. The spots of embarrassed, frustrated color on her pale cheeks make his heart hurt. He should have planned better. “She’ll visit, I guess, but school . . . we’ll figure that out. Wherever we end up. You can pick.”

The car comes to a sudden stop. Sudden to him, but the nearby screech of Ryan and Esposito’s tires suggests he might be in a world of his own. 

His gaze swings toward the driver’s seat.He finds her suspended there with him, arrested in the act of jerking the door handle. Her body twists in two directions, her shoulders toward him, her knees toward the outside world.

“You’re running away from your wife . . .” 

Her words come slowly. Incredulously, and he’s glad for the chance to jump in.“ _Ex_ -wife.”

“ . . . and you think I’m going to come with you?”

“Exactly.” He’s weak with relief. She gets it. She finally gets it. “Exactly, Beckett.” 


	7. Ulterior—Home Is Where the Heart Stops (1 x 07)

_“I want it to feel authentic."_

_—Richard Castle, Home is Where the Heart Stops (1 x 07)_

* * *

She’s been working under the assumption that the sole reason for Richard Castle’s presence at the Twelfth—if not the sole reason for his very existence—is to get into her pants or drive her insane, possibly both. Probably both.

More than that, she’s been working under the assumption that everyone _else_ is working under that assumption—that they’re metaphorically pulling up chairs and munching popcorn on the sidelines of this would-be seduction. And it’s a fact that she’s seen money changing hands. It’s a fact conversations have a tendency to die abrupt and telling deaths when she walks into the break room, and her hard stare has most definitely been getting a work out.

So she burns him, loudly and publicly, as often as she can. She plays up his fumbles and foibles. She makes it clear he’s an absolute pain in the ass, if she acknowledges his existence at all. She rolls her eyes so hard and so often that she really does wonder if her great aunt Beatrice was right, and they might stick that way.

She works hard to make it clear that he’s absolutely failing. So hard, in fact, that it’s a blush-inducing revelation that it’s not all about her. Or it _is_ all about her, but it’s not all about . . . adding her to his little black book.

Oh, he _would_ if she were willing. She has the memory of his ribs rising with a sharp, sudden intake of breath as she braced her arms around him in the narrow confines of the shooting range stall to tell her that. She has the memory of his fingers fumbling with his cufflink as he caught his first glimpse of her in that dress, and a tidy collection of stolen glances in the limo, on the red carpet, across the dance floor. He definitely, enthusiastically would add her.

But it’s not _entirely_ about that. She has the memory of the fancy smart board in his office, his downcast eyes and palpable discomfort as her fingers hovered over the skeletal outline of the story: _Except mine’s fake_. She has a skeletal outline of her own forming that nests memories within memories within memories. Because he pulled her out of a pretty dark spiral when he tracked her down at the range and played the fool, and the gesture with the dress was quieter—more complicated and disarming—than she would have thought possible with him.

She has the accumulated memory of the all-nighters he’s pulled and the first-thing-in-the-morning furrow in his brow that tells her he’s spent hours mulling over the minutiae of a case. She has the irrefutable fact that what tumbles out of his mouth is just as likely to be kind, funny, astute, _useful_ as it is calculated to flirt, annoy, seduce. She has the complicated truth that what tumbles out of his mouth is neither and both at once.

It’s all about her. It’s not. It’s complicated.


	8. Versatility—Ghosts (1 x 08)

_“What are we playing for?”_

_—Kate Beckett, Ghosts (1 x 08)_

* * *

 

He’s not really himself lately. That’s not a problem, per se. He’s practically made a profession out of not really being himself. He’s damned near perfected the _art_ of not being himself, and he can count on one hand—with plenty of leftover fingers—the number of people who can tell the difference. But what’s different lately—what’s _interesting_ , but not a problem, per se—is these sudden versions even he doesn’t recognize.

It catches him most unawares in the mouths of others. 

Esposito sneers a little about how excited he is to be heading out to a body after midnight and he has to bite his tongue, because if he doesn’t he might blurt out why. He might shoot back that he’s running out of fingers to count the number of times Kate Beckett has been to his house, and a body means he doesn’t have to say good night.

Lee Wax asks for the secret to his “all-access pass,” and there are a dozen things he wants to shout in her face, and it’s _definitely_ not like him to shut down a conversation like that with a woman like her. For all kinds of reasons, it’s not like him.

There’s his mother’s unwelcome (and near constant) commentary on what he is doing, what he usually does, what he absolutely must not do, and most of the time it has him blinking and looking over his shoulder for whomever it is she must be talking about. Even Alexis’s chiding and tentative approaches have him mystified about this stranger suddenly walking among them.   
  
It’s not just offscreen dialogue, though. It’s not entirely that he’s suddenly the subject of a third-person, unreliable narrator. It’s what he does, what he thinks, how he feels.

He’s never, _ever_ worked this hard, for one thing.

It’s all well and good for her to make fun of his—narratively solid, thank you very much—bouts of inspiration when a new detail finally breaks their way on a case. It’s all well and good for her to talk about facts and questioning, pursuing, _investigating,_ because she’s obviously, for some reason that absolutely defies explanation, used to work. She’s _good_ at work.

He’s . . . not.

Or at least he’s not good at this kind of work. The kind of work she demands as a character—as a woman. Because she runs him absolutely ragged if he tries to ask her anything straight on and ok, he should have seen that one coming. Because, hello? Cop.

But she’s also uncannily good at knowing when he’s watching. When he thinks he’s grabbed hold of the merest scintilla of truth about her,she’s diabolically good at shifting into another posture, mode, persona. And the worst of it—the best of it—is there’s no artifice. It’s all her.

He’s not himself. His self—any one of the selves he’s gotten in the lazy habit of being—doesn’t have a hope in hell of knowing her. So he’ll be better.


	9. Multifarious—Little Girl Lost (1 x 09)

"I didn't ask." 

—Richard Castle, Little Girl Lost (1 x 09)

* * *

 

She’s accepted that he’s actually writing a book. She _hates_ it with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. And the whir of _Tiger Beat_ butterflies in the pit of her stomach suggests that she also double-extra-secretly-would-never-in-a-bazillion-years-admit-it kind of way sort of— _maybe—_ likes the idea that her favorite author is writing a book based on her.

Although she is going to have to murder him for the naked silhouette.

And for tricking her into admitting that she has an account on his website.

(And for thinking she could possibly be that psychopath, CastleLover45.)

And for implying that her gun is some kind of strategic accessory.

And for making her sacrifice her bear claw to claim the moral high ground.

And for more _Tiger Beat_ butterflies, because . . . he dreams about her?

  
So, ok, she hates the idea that he’s writing a book (and she _might_ double-extra-secret like it in the inside-est of her inside-her-head voices), but she accepts that it’s happening. She accepts that it’s at least one among many things on his agenda when he shows up to torment her on a shockingly regular basis.

But this this new thing he’s doing since Will showed up? That’s not about some stupid (secretly a little awesome) book.

It’s not even what he’s doing. It’s that he’s _not doing_ everything she would have predicted he _would do,_ literally right up to the moment she rammed a bear claw—a bear claw that was by all laws of God and man _hers_ —in his mouth.

He sat out the interview with the merest tweak of her pigtails.

He went home when she asked him to, and he more or less sailed right past the exquisitely awkward moment he walked in on Will backing her into the Candelas’ kitchen wall.

He’s not hounding her for gory details, and other than his mercifully short-lived _Who’s Sorenson?_ phase, he hasn’t been hounding anyone else for them either. And she’s checked. A lot. And as much as she’d like to put a painful conversation with Lanie on the list of reasons to murder him, maybe that’s what she gets for . .. being paranoid?

Except she’s _not_ paranoid _,_ right?

He knows how she takes her coffee and that she’s too proud to ask why she can do exactly the same thing he does, and what comes out of that stupid espresso machine isn’t nearly as good.

He knows what color marker she wants before she’s finished with the one she doesn’t want any more.

He knows her dress size and the exact shade of red that’s exactly her, just as surely as he knows she’d never have chosen it for herself.

He knows that Will is the least of what’s awful about this case.

He knows that Will isn’t the least of it at all.

And he’s not doing a single thing she would have sworn he would do about it.


	10. Uroborus—A Death in the Family (1 x 10)

_"Are you sure you want to know?"_  
_—Dr. Clark Murray, A Death in the Family (1 x 10)_

* * *

The dedication is the first thing he writes. His skin is still tingling from the hot wash of her breath over it: _You have no idea._ He hasn’t even made the call yet, and he knows he’ll have to plead his case, but this first. He dashes it off in half a minute.He sets the two lines in small caps, smackin the middle of a blank page, then saves as a document all its own.

He does a victory lap around the office, like he’s got half a million words under his belt, and that’s practically how he feels. _Cocky_. That’s how he feels, and damn, it’s been a while. Between the end of Gina and the long-overdue end of Derrick Storm, it’s been a damned long while. 

He knows it will annoy her. Somewhere in a future that stretches wide and brilliant before him, he knows that handful of words will bug the _hell_ out of her, and that’s quite the prospect. It’s something rife with possibility, and that’s practically a novelty, too, at this point.

_Possibility._

It’s not so much the future he’s found a sudden hold on again. That’s not exactly it, although he stares down the state of decay in the bedroom, the master bath, the office—every space that’s his alone—and, yeah, he might have gotten a little melodramatic about the impossibility of the _F_ word in the bowels of his writer’s block. But possibility has made itself well and truly scarce for longer than he cares contemplate, and she contains multitudes.

She doesn’t like him. _Yet_. His mind insists on that, and there’s _cocky_ again. She really doesn’t, though. She hardly even _dis_ likes him, though there was that satisfying string of adjectival phrases in the Captain’s office when she found out she was stuck with him. But beyond that, she disregards him. She . . . endures him like some slightly regrettable background detail.

The dedication will fix that, though. The book will, eventually. The adjectival phrases will fly, and who knows what else? He has his suspicions about her. His mind fairly crackles with suspicions about what makes her tick and how, exactly, a man of his talents might work with that. His fingers fly across the keys. One page fills and another and another and another. He calls the ever-swelling document _Possibilities._

He keeps the first document right on his desktop— _DEDICATION,_ all in confident caps _._ He taps it to life and lets it fill his screen every once in a while when there’s a fifteen-possibility pile-up and the ideas won’t quite make their way out of his mind. When his fingers slow and finally still.  When he has to catch a breath before he can decide which path to go racing down down next, he taps it to life and stares at the two simple lines. He’s satisfied with it. Absolutely, entirely satisfied. 

_For Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD:_

_A mystery in search of a writer no more_

 

* * *

It’s a quiet scene in the hospital corridor. If you could call even call it a scene. It’s over so quickly. She takes a single, stumbling step backward. Pain—agony—flickers behind her eyes for one-one-hundredth of a second, then it’s gone. She’s gone, even before she walks away, one-one-hundredth of a second after that. 

There’s a merciless, elastic instant in between when the connection between them, vital and profound as he suddenly knows it to be, is snapped. She’s _gone_ from him.

_You and I are done._

The words are black, branching fingers. They rake at his insides and close around his heart. They throttle the would-be voice that wants to shout it can’t possibly end like this.

_Done._

He doesn’t believe it. He _knows_ it, but he literally cannot believe. It’s not denial. It doesn’t rise to the level of cognitive dissonance, though both are on the horizon, if he knows himself at all.

He might not.

He pushes to his feet from the creaking, molded plastic chair and realizes he really doesn’t know himself.

He knows who he was. He traces her steps down the chaos of the hospital corridor. He sees clearly—by decidedly unflattering light—who he was a few short months ago. He walks the mile home, damning phrases piling up.

_Prying, oblivious, callous, selfish. Cocky._

The litany halts. A hiss of something acid black lashes out at the rest of the world. _Blame, justification, self-righteousness._ It lashes out and dies. For now, at least.

His mother looks up as he pushes through the door. He shakes his head, barely making eye contact. The litany continues.

 _Richard_.

He startles at the sound of his own name. His steps falter. He holds up a hand and drags his way into the office.

It’s dark the next time he lifts his head. He’s been sitting there for . . . he really doesn’t know how long. His gaze falls on the laptop. He pulls it to him. It’s cold to the touch in way that’s unfamiliar. A way that bodes ill, though he has no idea what he means to do.

He has no idea all. His head feels as empty as the rest of him feels sick and full, but his hands are sure. He thumbs the latch. Two fingers drag the cursor inexorably to the document. The file name strikes a painful, reverberating chord— _DEDICATION._

He tries not to read them—the two lines he’s been so fucking smug about all this time. He highlights and consigns them to oblivion with a lightning-fast move, but they’re inscribed on the backs of his eyelids.

He stares at the bleak, empty page. He can’t bear it.

The floodgates of his mind open. Memory, insight, yearning. The awful smell of burnt hospital coffee mixes with the clean, mild scent of her.

His fingers find the keys of their own volition. One line this time. Just one line for now.

_To the extraordinary KB_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. A few people have asked if I intend to continue for Season 2. As of April 6, I've posted two short pieces, one for each of the first two episodes of Season 2, to my tumblr: http://pollylynn.tumblr.com
> 
> I can't guarantee that I'll be able to keep up this pace, and I'm reluctant to post any new things here at AO3 for a number of reasons, not least of which is it feels like a waste of people's time if circumstances and my Brain conspire to stop before I have anything appreciable written.


End file.
